Name: wilderness
SKU: 18742643
Price: 14.78 EUR
Availability: InStock
Author: Samantha Harvey

Type

Physical Book

Author

Samantha Harvey

Publisher

Vintage

Synopsis "wilderness"

Its Jakes birthday. He is sitting in a small plane, being flown over the landscape that has been the backdrop to his life his childhood, his marriage, his work, his passions. Now he is in his early sixties, and he isnt quite the man he used to be. He has lost his wife, his son is in prison, and he is about to lose his past. Jake has Alzheimers. As the disease takes hold of him, Jake struggles to hold on to his personal story, to his memories and identity, but they become increasingly elusive and unreliable. What happened to his daughter? Is she alive, or long dead? And why exactly is his son in prison? What went so wrong in his life? There was a cherry tree once, and a yellow dress, but what exactly do they mean? As Jake, assisted by poor Eleanor, a childhood friend with whom for some unfathomable reason he seems to be sleeping, fights the inevitable dying of the light, the key events of his life keep changing as he tries to grasp them, and what until recently seemed solid fact is melting into surreal dreams or nightmarish imaginings. Is there anything hell be able to salvage from the wreckage? Beauty, perhaps, the memory of love, or nothing at all? From the first sentence to the last, The Wilderness holds us in its grip. This is writing of extraordinary power and beauty.

Samantha Harvey

(Author)

View Author's Page

Samantha Harvey (Kent in 1975) is a British novelist. Her work covers themes such as memory, identity, and spirituality, explored with lyrical and evocative prose. Her first novel, The Wilderness (2009), won the Betty Trask Award and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the Guardian First Book Award.

Among her most notable works are All Is Song (2012), Dear Thief (2014), and The Western Wind (2018). In 2024, Harvey won the Booker Prize for her novel Orbital, a space epic that narrates the reflections of six astronauts at the International Space Station over 24 hours. In addition to her novels, she has published a non-fiction work titled The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping (2020), where she addresses her experience with insomnia.

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